MARKET DAY - Part 3 Morning & Afternoon

This is  Part 3 of a 4-part series describing

a typical Saturday ---Market Day --- in Glória. 

Note: Some of the names in this story have

been changed because I can’t remember the

real names of all of the people in the town.

Morning & Afternoon:

        After shopping at the weekly market, we carried our heavy purchases to our small house. Brunie placed a bit of dried corn and a bowl of water on the floor, then untied the chicken’s legs and let her strut around the kitchen. Neither of us had the heart to kill a chicken, so when we decided to cook chicken for dinner, we would take her to a neighbor to trade for a chicken the neighbor had killed.
        Brunie had opted to purchase a small stove powered by a propane tank, thus we used our built-in wood-burning stove as counter space. We soaked vegetables in iodine water and placed them in our kerosene refrigerator. We cut gristle and fat from the meat, throwing it out the back door where large vultures with blue-black opalescent heads swooped down to gather the scraps. We placed fruit in large gourds that had been cut in half to make bowls. Beans, rice, and other dry goods went in airtight containers, more to protect them from mice than to keep them fresh.

Ceramic drip water filter similar

to one we used in Glória.

        I used a handful of sugar as an abrasive cleaner for the filter in our drinking-water crock and set a huge pot of water to boil for the required twenty minutes before adding it to the terra cotta water filter.
        By eight-thirty or nine, we had completed our chores and were ready to prepare breakfast. Brunie flipped through our James Beard paperback cookbook ---conveniently issued by the Peace Corps ---to find a pancake recipe. She mixed flour, eggs, baking powder, sugar, powdered milk, water, and vanilla. I cut up a banana and sectioned an orange.
        Someone had told Brunie that there was no maple syrup in Brazil, so she had packed two bottles of concentrated maple flavoring in her foot locker. We mixed it with corn syrup to approximate the maple syrup we enjoyed at home.
        After breakfast, I spent the morning working on lessons for my English classes. The ginásio was staffed with some bankers and elementary school teachers who worked during the day, so high school classes were held evenings and on Saturdays as well as weekday afternoons. I, too, was a professora at the ginásio. 

        Since we had eaten breakfast later than usual, we skipped lunch. While most Glorianos took their after-lunch siestas, I headed to the school's office in the priests' home next to the church. Using Padre Henrique’s typewriter and the school’s hand-cranked mimeograph machine I made copies of a worksheet for my two o’clock class of beginning English students.

Students show off their

new school uniforms.

        Only fifteen of the twenty-one students showed up, not bad for Saturday. Even fewer arrived for my three and four-o’clock classes, but a few students lingered after class, trying out the American slang I had taught them.

        “Do you think I’m cute?” asked Fernando.
        Veralucia laughed and said, “No, Fernando. You are not cute. But you are cool.” The boys snickered because the word ‘cool’ sounded like a naughty Portuguese word. The students laughed and teased each other, butchering English about as much as I normally butchered their language.
        Veralucia asked, “Will you go to the movie tonight, Dona Carolina?”
        “No. I already saw tonight’s film,” I lied.
        “I can never understand the English on American films. Why is that?”
        Of course she couldn’t. The sound system on the projector was so bad that even I couldn’t understand the garbled English. I had attended one film, the first weekend I spent in Glória. I vowed it would be my last. The theater had hard wooden seats with almost no leg room. There was no ventilation in the theater. After twenty minutes it felt and smelled like a steamy locker room.
        To help promote the Brazilian film industry, a law prevented foreign films from being dubbed into Portuguese. Therefore every American film had Portuguese subtitles. The owner paid a few high school students to sit at strategic places so they could be ‘readers’. They read the subtitles out loud so any illiterate citizens could enjoy the movie.
        Brunie had spent the afternoon at the office of an agronomist and home economist commissioned by the state government to impliment agricultural and nutrition improvements in the small town. Many farmers requested hybrid corn or other seeds from Luís Carlos. Brunie and Irene talked to women about boiling and filtering water and adding more vegetables to their diets.

Trucks carried vendors and shoppers to and from the

 weekly market.  Our neighbor Gugú, who carried

water to our house, sits on his donkey to the right.

        Trucks, horses, donkeys, and mules with the last of the market-day vendors and shoppers passed me as I walked home from the school. Many vendors would travel to markets in other towns Monday through Friday the next week and return to Glória on Saturday.
        When I arrived home, I decided to take a shower and wash my hair. First I heated water in a huge cooking pot, then mixed enough cold water with it to make it luke warm. In the kitchen, with a slightly slanted mud-brick floor and no windows, I undressed and scooped water into a smaller pot and poured it over my head, allowing it to run under the door to the outside. 

        The house was equipped with a small shower stall, but one had to carry pails of water and go outside to enter it, so it was more convenient to shower inside the house. Besides, soon after she arrived in Glória, Brunie had found a snake in the shower room, so we used it only for storing brooms and other tools. We brushed our teeth standing just inside the back door, spitting into the yard.
        Since we had been to the market that morning, we had a variety of fresh foods for dinner. We could make beef stew with potatoes, onions and carrots. We could use our hand-cranked meat grinder to make hamburgers or meat sauce for pasta. But, since it was Saturday and Brunie wanted to go to the movie that night, we opted for something less time-consuming. We fried fresh pork and heated leftover beans and rice from our kerosene refrigerator. There was always fruit for dessert. We often ended our meal with maté tea. Brunie didn’t like coffee, and frankly the coffee in Glória wasn’t very good. Someone explained that all the good coffee was exported.
        After cleaning the dishes and storing leftovers, we left for Saturday night on the town. The second town square was not used for the market. It had been planted with grass, trees, and other tropical plants. And there were benches scattered around the perimeter. That is were everyone gathered to watch the movemento.

The praça where everyone 

strolled on Saturday night, 

to see and be seen.

See other posts in this series:

Market Day - Part 1 Dawn

Market Day - Part 2 Shopping

Market Day - Part 3 Morning and Afternoon (this one)

Market Day - Part 4 Saturday Night

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)

MARKET DAY - Part 4 Saturday Night

This is Part 4 of a 4-part series describing

a typical Saturday ---Market Day ---in Glória.

Note: Some of the names in this story have

been changed because I can’t remember the

real names of all of the people in the town.

Saturday Night - "Hole" Numbers:

        After dinner, Brunie and I strolled around the praça near the church and the post office. This was the time and place to watch the movemento and to be seen watching the movemento. 

        When we tired of strolling, we chose a bench emblazened with script telling us that the bench had been provided by the benevolence of our esteemed mayor. Sometimes we would be surrounded by inquisitive students and neighbors who loved to hear about the United States.

        The Ciné Glória presented a film each Friday and Saturday night. Typically it was an American film with Portuguese subtitles. The projector's sound was so bad we couldn't understand the English. The theatre had hard wooden seats that had not been built for long-legged Americans. It was hot and stuffy inside. If possible, I usually begged off by saying I had seen the film previously ---which was likely because the theater showed mostly old black and white films that had been shown on American TV hundreds of times. Brunie often went to the theater and returned to the praça around 8:30 or 9:00.

        While I waited for her, I purchased popcorn from the children who sold it outside of the theater. I continued socializing with my students and neighbors, or I might stop into a nearby home to visit.
        Then we headed toward the A.A.B.B. ---Associação Atlética Banco do Brasil. Most of the bankers, young and without seniority, were exiled to small towns in the interior. Those who honed their skills, learned English, and stayed with the bank long enough, could receive promotions to better positions and in larger, more-desirable cities. Meanwhile, they set up a club to entertain themselves. Although they had occasional parties, most nights they played buraco, a card game similar to Canasta, and ran up bar bills that rivaled the Brazilian national debt.

        Brunie and I sat with Cardoso and Carlinhos and several other young men and a few female friends. The young men and women from the town were home with family, but those who worked in Glória, but were not from there, joined us at the A.A.B.B.  

        We could purchase Cokes or beer or other liquor, but generally the guys insisted on paying for our drinks. Brunie loved Coca Cola. I preferred Brahma Choppe.

        Carlinhos, a handsome bank teller, was dating one of my students. She was at home. Cardoso, considered one of the most eligible bachelors in town, delivered loan money and collected payments from farmers who lived so far into the interior that they rarely made it to town. Where there was a definite language barrier, what I liked about him was that he had a sense of humor that I understood.
        When the next hand was dealt, I entered a game. I had played buraco so much, I could have played in my sleep. In fact, I spent many nights dreaming about the game. Besides the giant box of paperback books provided by the U.S. government, it was my only entertainment. 

        Buraco means "hole." I guess it was so named because it was possible to lose so many points that one ended up 'in the hole.' The object of the game was to earn as many points as possible ---or at least stay out of the hole. The men kept meticulous records of ongoing scores in notebooks filled with numbers.

        At nine forty-five, the electric lights flicked off for a few seconds. That was the signal that the town’s electric generator would go off in fifteen minutes, time enough to head home while the street lights were still on.
        For me, living without electricity was one of the most difficult aspects of life in Glória. But I had been told that it could be worse. The mayor’s friend, Zé, ran the electrical generator. When the opposition political party had been elected before the present administration had regained political power, Zé refused to run the machine.
        When I arrived in Glória, we had electricity for four hours each night. But that was going to change within a year. Energipe, the electrical company for the state of Sergipe, would be installing full-time electrical power.
 

(L to R) Bankers Cardoso & Carlinhos, Agronomist Etivaldo (?)

          Carlinhos and Cardoso carried kerosene lanterns from the back room for each table. Brunie and a few other women left at midnight so they could rise for early mass the next day. I, on the other hand, preferred to spend my Sunday mornings on my straw-filled mattress.  The rest of us continued playing cards until 2:00 in the morning.
        Cardoso drove me home in his new VW Beatle.  Then he and Carlinhos headed to the pensão where they boarded. Outside my door, I looked up. Without electric lights competing with the sky, the heavens seemed to hold more stars than I ever remembered seeing at home. The Southern Cross, in the shape a a huge kite, dominated the sky over Glôria.
        Inside the door I used matches to light a small lantern. With lantern in hand, I crept past Brunie's door to my room. After crawling under my misquito net, I read by kerosene light until my eyelids became heavy. After reaching under the netting to extinguish the flame, I fell asleep, satisfied to have survived another busy week in Glória.

(©2009, C.J.Peiffer)

See other posts in this series:
Market Day - Part 1 Dawn
Market Day - Part 2 Shopping
Market Day - Part 3 Morning & Afternoon

Market Day - Part 4 Saturday Night (this one)

See my story "CARD TRICK" about my best

practical joke ever ---on my other blog

 PRO ARTZ.

LOSING IT IN BRAZIL

        When I was in Brazil, there was a joke among Peace Corps Volunteers: Why did male volunteers lose weight? Because they cooked for themselves. Why did female Volunteers gain weight? Because they cooked for themselves. 

        But, against odds, I lost approximately 30 pounds over the two years I lived in Brazil. I have several explanations for this.

        1. First, I walked everywhere. I had no car or bike in Glória. In larger cities, I caught a bus only when I had to travel more than a few miles.

        2. Everything had to be cooked from scratch. We didn’t have packaged foods. Chicken didn’t come in nice shrink-wrapped refrigerated packages. We had to buy a live chicken. When we purchased a chicken at the market, we carried it home, up-side-down, holding it by its feet. We put a bowl of water and some dried corn on the floor in the kitchen and the chicken was our house guest for a few days.
        I couldn’t kill a chicken. And after living with ours for several days, I didn’t want to eat it, either. So we took it to a neighbor and had her kill one of her chickens, then we gave her our live one. She wasn’t stupid. The chicken we got from her was never as plump as the one we had purchased at the weekly market.
        When it took so long to prepare food, we made less and ate less.

        3. Another reason for my weight loss, was the lack of variety in food. It just wasn’t that much fun to eat. We could buy chicken, pork or beef. There was also fish, but Brunie disliked fish so we never cooked it. There were many tropical fruits, oranges, bananas, guava, and pineapple in season. The choice of vegetables was limited to potatoes, yams, tomatoes, carrots, and cabbage. Occasionally we found green beans or broccoli in the capital city but never in Glória.
        The Brazilians ate almost the same thing every day. For breakfast they would have fruit, bread and coffee. For lunch (the largest meal of the day) they ate some kind of meat or fish with back beans and rice. Dinner would be soup, bread, and fruit.

        4. There were no places to grab a quick meal or snack in Glória. No McDonald’s. No pizza parlors. Until a few months before I left, no one had a freezer, so there was no ice cream either.

        5. Probably the biggest reason I lost weight is that there were no nicely-packaged snack foods. At a bar, one could buy hard-cooked eggs or a whole roasted chicken. At parties, hosts often served peanuts which had been boiled, in their shells, in salty water. They weren’t crunchy and roasted. I could eat them, but I didn’t like them much.
        One could buy popcorn sold by children in front of the movie theater on Friday and Saturday nights. At home, Brazilians placed cobs of corn on the hot coals in their wood-burning ovens until the kernels popped while still on the cob. But there was nothing like pretzels or potato chips. So, we had to figure out how to make our own.
        We tried to make taco dough, without a recipe, by hand grinding corn into meal, then cutting and frying it into corn chips. Our experiments were unsuccessful.
        Next we attempted to make potato chips. The problem, of course, was slicing the potatoes thin enough. Luckily Brunie had been told before going to Brazil to pack a few potato peelers because they were unavailable in Brazil. So we peeled potatoes, then laboriously sliced them with the potato peelers into paper-thin slices, deep fried them to a golden yellow, and sprinkled them with salt as they drained on paper towels.
        Everyone liked the potato chips and often asked us to make them for parties. It would take several days to make enough for even a small gathering. Not knowing what to call the new delicacy, the Brazilians just called them batatas fritas ---fried potatoes.
        Now that I know more about entrepreneurship, if this had happened to me recently, I would have seen a golden opportunity to open a potato chip factory in the sertão. I might have been soley responsible for increasing cholesterol in Brazil. But at the time, it never crossed my mind.

        6. And finally, one last reason I lost weight. At our final meeting in Rio before heading home, we had to have extensive medical tests. The doctor found I had roundworms. Symptoms include loss of appetite and weight loss. I hadn't had them for long because they weren't present in my previous medical tests. Roundworms are prevalent in tropical climates and can be passed from soil, from people, insects and other animals. 
        I had to take three horse-sized anti-parasitic pills each night for several nights before they were eliminated from my intestines. Actually I felt quite lucky. There were some volunteers who suffered from more severe medical problems, such as amoebic dysentery, that had nasty symptoms and were more difficult to cure.

        Brazilians are often quite frank; they say exactly what they are thinking. Several of them told me that when I arrived in Glória, I was pretty and forte ---strong. Before I left I was magra ---thin ---and presumably less attractive. In that area of Brazil's northeast, where many didn’t have enough to eat, forte was better than magra. 

        Forty years later, Brazil is the plastic surgery capital of the world.

(©2009. C.J. Peiffer)

FLAMED

        When I arrived at my Peace Corps site and discovered I would be living without electricity or running water, it seemed like my life there would be much like a two-year-long camping trip. I had been a Girl Scout. I was prepared ---or so I thought.
        I admit that it was fun for a while, using my Girl Scout skills and learning new ones to get along in the harsh environment, but after a while, I missed many of the conveniences of home.
        On one occasion, forgetting that things didn’t work in Glória the way they worked at home, could have turned into a disaster.

        When I arrived, Brunie (who had already been in Glória for a year) took me to a carpentry shop to buy a hand-made wooden bed, an extra chair, and a wardrobe. We went to another shop for a mattress, which was a large cotton sack filled with straw. It was comfortable enough, although I needed to add more straw from time to time since the original straw would break into small pieces and settle after a while. 

        When we changed sheets, we sprinkled a powder on the mattress covers to kill bed bugs which were a common problem in that area. We always slept under mosquito nets to protect us, not only from mosquitos, but also from scorpions and the beetles that carried Chagas disease.
        While one side wall of the house faced an open area, the other side wall was also the wall of our landlord’s home next door. And the opposite wall of his house was shared with another neighbor and so on down the street. There was a space between the horizontal top of each wall and the pointed roof, leaving a large triangular open area between homes. This made it easy to converse with the neighbors next door, but it also meant one could hear everything going on at the landlord's home. He and his wife were newlyweds, so you might imagine what I mean by "everything."

        Our front door left an inch or two of open space between the bottom of it and the floor. This, plus the open area between houses, meant that unwanted varmints could enter the house, either from outside or from the neighbor’s homes. We had toads, mice, bats, roaches, tarantulas, and an occasional snake in the house. 

        I hadn’t taken much jewelry with me, but I had a dozen pair of earrings and several inexpensive rings and a watch which I kept in a box on the table I used as a night stand. One day, while making the bed, I knocked the box onto the floor. The various pieces scattered under the bed.
        Because of the assorted vermin that could be lurking there, in no way was I was going to reach into the shadows below the mattress without seeing what was there first. So, I did what I would do at home. I grabbed a lamp, and put it under the bed. I started to pick up my jewelry before I realized that a kerosene lantern with an open flame under a mattress filled with straw was not the brightest idea I ever had.

        Luckily Brunie was in the kitchen. I yelled for her to bring a pot of water from the huge ceramic storage container there. Meanwhile I started to beat the flames with a towel. 

        Within a few minutes, the fire was out. The sheets were burned in one large spot as was part of my mattress. Considering it was filled with dry straw, I was surprised it wasn't engulfed in flames within seconds. The wooden frame of the bed was blackened on a small area of the side, but more scorched than burned. 

        Fortunately the mosquito net had been flung aside before I started to make the bed. If It had caught fire, the flames would probably have leaped to the ceiling where the net was attached to a lattice of wood that held up the ceramic tile roof. Since the homes were attached, the fire might have spread from lattice to lattice, resulting in the roofs of all the houses on that side of the street caving in. 

        Glória had no fire department. And since there was no running water, residents would not even be able to hook up a hose to spray water on their ceilings. Any attempt to throw water as high as that from buckets would have been futile. 

        I am so glad I hadn't caused neighbors to lose their homes or belongings. Worse yet would have been if I had caused someone a serious injury.

        I could imagine the headline: PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEER'S STUPIDITY LEAVES DOZENS OF BRAZILIANS HOMELESS.  But luckily that didn't happen.

       After cleaning up the charred mess and water in my bedroom, I had to buy new sheets and take my mattress to the shop to have the cover patched and re-stuffed with new straw. It retained a burnt odor for months.

        I also bought a flashlight to keep beside my bed ---a prudent purchase.

(©2009, C.J. Peiffer)